Wed 2010-05-19 13:23 EDT

Conspiracy of Banks Rigging States Came With Crash (Update1)

...a nationwide conspiracy in which financial advisers to municipalities colluded with Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Wachovia Corp. and 11 other banks... rigged bids on auctions for so-called guaranteed investment contracts, known as GICs, according to a Justice Department list that was filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on March 24 and then put under seal. Those contracts hold tens of billions of taxpayer money...The workings of the conspiracy -- which stretched from California to Pennsylvania and included more than 200 deals involving about 160 state agencies, local governments and non- profits -- can be pieced together from the Justice Department's indictment of CDR, civil lawsuits by governments around the country, e-mails obtained by Bloomberg News and interviews with current and former bankers and public officials. "The whole investment process was rigged across the board," said Charlie Anderson, who retired in 2007 as head of field operations for the Internal Revenue Service's tax-exempt bond division. "It was so commonplace that people talked about it on the phones of their employers and ignored the fact that they were being recorded." Anderson said he referred scores of cases to the Justice Department when he was with the IRS. He estimates that bid rigging cost taxpayers billions of dollars...

Banks Rigging States Came; conspiracy; Crash; Update1.

Mon 2010-03-01 09:20 EST

AlterNet: Hey, America: It's Time to Redefine the "Good Life"; excerpted from the The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

...We are social epidemiologists; people who usually spend their time trying to understand how social factors affect population health. Our work has focused on different aspects of wellbeing in rich market democracies. Rather than looking at subjective measures, such as happiness, we have looked at objective measures, such as life expectancy, homicide rates, drug abuse, child well-being, levels of trust, involvement in community life, mental illness, teenage birth rates, children's math and literacy scores, and the proportion of the population in prison. Instead of finding that each society does well on some of these outcomes and badly on others, we found that countries tend to be consistently good or bad performers, across the board. If a country has high life expectancy, it also tends to have stronger community life, a smaller proportion of its population behind bars, better mental health, fewer drug problems and children doing better in school. The differences in the performance of more and less equal countries are very large. Rather than things being just a bit worse in more unequal countries, they are very much worse. More unequal countries have three times the rates of violence, of infant mortality and of mental illness. Their teenage birth rates are six times as high, and rates of imprisonment are eight times higher...

AlterNet; America; excerpts; good life; Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger; redefines; Spirit Level; Time.

zero hedge Tue 2009-10-27 11:50 EDT

Freddie Mac Annualized Defaults Hit Record High At 7.3%, Even As Lending Increases Once Again

With the US government now having taken over the functions of such pristine subprime lenders as New Century, with the provision that it not only is not checking borrowers' credit scores, income potential, or other "facts" that the mortgage lenders at least pretended to care about, but also giving away massive incentives to promote housing bubble V2, it was only a matter of time before the taxpayer's balance sheet would start looking like an Angelo Mozilo wet dream. Today, Freddie Mac released its September Monthly Volume Summary and, as expected, it is beginning to look just like the subprime debacle is among us, only this time all of America is on the hook thanks to a brilliant Fed and the even more brilliant geniuses in D.C.

3; 7; Freddie Mac Annualized Defaults Hit Record High; lending increasingly; Zero Hedge.

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis Mon 2009-09-21 14:57 EDT

Strategic Default Data Suggests Foreclosure Prevention Tactics Useless

Michael Shedlock

An interesting report in the Los Angeles Times shows that a person with super-prime credit scores is more likely to walk away from an underwater mortgage than a person with a subprime credit rating.

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis; Strategic Default Data Suggests Foreclosure Prevention Tactics Useless.

Tue 2008-08-19 00:00 EDT

Minyanville -

NEWS & VIEWS-A Tale of Two Markets, Part 3, by Bennet Sedacca; "spreads in the credit markets are at historically wide levels and show no signs of tightening"; AIG "just one of scores of companies that cannot finance themselves"; "stocks remain...as over-valued as I have seen in many years"

Minyanville.

Thu 2007-09-27 00:00 EDT

Calculated Risk: Who Should Pay the Rating Agencies?

comparison to FICO, consumer credit scores; lenders seen "going out of their way to make sure those reports didn't tell the whole picture"

Calculated Risk; pay; Rating Agencies.